#john ashbury

[shy-girl04]

Unknown credit

I HAD THOUGHT THINGS WERE GOING ALONG WELL

But I was mistaken.

John Ashbery

[historybetweenthepages]

‘New Years Eve’ by John Ashbury and Kenneth Koch

From ‘Locus Solus 2’ published in 1961

“New Year’s Eve”: A Collaborative Poem by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch

In keeping with my semi-regular tradition of posting New Years-related poems here, I thought I’d share this rare piece — a collaborative poe

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jupiter Inlet 1968

* * * *

So many .... * "All night I hear so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted to look back, to save myself in hindsight, where all I see is the absence of me. Where all I hear is your voice…"

— Chard deNiord, from “This Ecstasy” [photo: Lisa Jefferson]View from their lot upriver from ours where we grew up * A nice Loxahatchee view. Most of the homes that were there when we were growing up are now gone. Bulldozed into nothingness to make way for the new more upscale design. I suppose that there is no use opposing change or progress [so called] because it'll come. But if you're used to or have memory of a more pristine beauty, you'll probably be called further into some new wilderness because it is the wild untamed aspect of the river that was really appealing. It could get so quiet there - the stars at night, the sometime phosphorescent water. Hardly any boats, hardly any crowding of anything except maybe mullet at the water's edge. It's hard to appreciate a place like that as a child except for intermittently. it's simply "home" and assumed like mother and father that it'll always be there and will always remain the same. But of course it isn't that same for one tiny moment much less years of time. We are compelled in ingest our experiences of people and places. We will probably not pass this way again. * “You are the many-petalled melting point of repeating decimals …” — Andrew Joron, from ‘Spine to Spin, Spoke to Speak,’ in Trance Archive: New & Selected Poems (City Lights Books, 2010) * “Did I have you There, that one time, And do I have you lost now? More steady, like a jar Marveling at its own emptiness, yet you shall taste it, A sea breeze one day glimpsed, Taken away, but you never knew you had it And so notice nothing strange, its absence Is perfect, and the room suddenly is lighter.” — John Ashbery, from “Disguised Zenith,” in April Galleons (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999)

[from Quidnunc my blog of remembrance]

[yourbespokeartisanalapocalypse]

[historybetweenthepages]

Some day we will try

To do as many things as are possible

And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful

Of them, but this will not have anything

To do with what is promised today, our

Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear

On the horizon. - John Ashbury, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1975

[poems-at-the-start]

John Ashbury, “The Painter”

Sitting between the sea and the buildings He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait. But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas Until the people who lived in the buildings Put him to work: “Try using the brush As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait, Something less angry and large, and more subject To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas? He chose his wife for a new subject, Making her vast, like ruined buildings, As if, forgetting itself, the portrait Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer: “My soul, when I paint this next portrait Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.” The news spread like wildfire through the buildings: He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! Too exhausted even to lift his brush, He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer Now of putting ourselves on canvas, Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait. Finally all indications of a subject Began to fade, leaving the canvas Perfectly white. He put down the brush. At once a howl, that was also a prayer, Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

[janhanklcult]

New ASHBURY

[superstitionrev]

Great article in the Paris Review about -adg versus -udge.